“It’s unflavoured Jell-O and it’s stabilized with alcohol and glycerin and then you use it as a platform,” said Regina artist Gerda Osteneck. “You put on your paint, you can manipulate the paint and you can use whatever you want as a tool to manipulate the paint. You end up with a variety of prints.”

She led a mono gel plate printing workshop hosted by the Moose Jaw Art Guild on Sunday at the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery during the trading card workshop.

“The point (of the workshop) is to show these people another way to make artist trading cards or bigger works of art,” said Osteneck. “I’m a collage artist. So I frequently add something to the background. Your tools are things you find around the house.”

Examples of tools to use can include stencils, rubber stamps, scrapbooking tools, bubble wrap, recycled papers, art papers, paint techniques used in other art forms or “you can make up your own,” said Osteneck.

Types of paints to use could be acrylic paint, craft paint or metallic paint to add depth to the art.

“You can use all kinds of basic things,” said Osteneck. “It’s very accessible. You can scoop up three or four things from your kitchen and make these.”

She has been using the mono gel plate printing technique for about a year.

“A friend of mine mentioned it on Facebook posts so I Googled it and there’s a number of sites that give you the basic information, which gave me a basic recipe,” said Osteneck. “I made some up, invited a couple of other artists over for coffee and just played with it.”

She added her favourite part is to discover new things.

“You may plan to do a certain thing, but at the end of the day my favourite is usually the one that’s quite accidental,” said Osteneck.

Makayla Sloan and Jaimee Hodgson, both 11, came out to the workshop on Sunday. It was their second time at a trading card workshop.

Hodgson said last time they used water pencil crayons for their trading cards. “You colour it and then you take water and you brush it over and it makes it look like paint,” said Hodgson. “It was fun last time. We were kind of the only ones here so we got to learn a whole bunch of different stuff.”

Sloan said she liked that “you can use your imagination” when making trading cards.

“We even got some of the people in our class doing it,” added Hodgson.

Brenda King came from Weyburn to take part in the workshop.

“I don’t know much about this process but it’s great to learn something new,” she said. “When you have a small group you’re always trading with the same people. So it’s really nice to go to Regina or to Moose Jaw or wherever and meet more people.”

She has been doing trading cards for five years. She also trades online with people from Russia, Argentina, Australia and other places.

“I’ve always felt like I’ve been artistic in a way, but I’ve never really had time when I worked. (Trading cards are) not intimidating because they’re so small. So you can experiment and if it doesn’t work, it’s not like doing a watercolour that’s taken you three weeks,” said King. “It’s a shorter amount of time you’ve invested in it.”